About
I'm an AI-enabled sensemaker and teacher-builder who turns messy human identity into operating systems and experiments that unlock momentum for creators and early-stage teams.
The throughline across everything I do: help people get unstuck and build what only they can.
What I Do Now
- Teach — MBA entrepreneurship at Rice University (New Enterprises, MGMT 621). I've taught hundreds of students how to move from idea to validated business.
- Build — Personal Cartography, a methodology and practice for creators and mid-career changers who want to turn their identity into an operating system.
- Advise — Strategic diagnosis for 0→1 products and go-to-market. I specialize in the messy early stage where the problem isn't execution — it's figuring out what to execute.
- Write — On AI workflows, identity infrastructure, and building in public.
Background
20+ years across startups, enterprise software, investing, and education:
- Startup CEO — Built and led early-stage companies from zero to revenue.
- VMware — Director-level roles in product marketing and go-to-market.
- Angel investor & PE advisor — Pattern recognition across industries and founder psychologies.
- 3 years selling in Asia — High-context communication, reading between lines.
- 80+ countries — Empathic calibration across cultures and contexts.
- Creator economy — Helped 250+ creators find their niche and monetize since 2020.
I'm a strategic shapeshifter with a mapmaker's mind — part philosopher, part founder, part futurist. I move between startups and classrooms, creator communities and boardrooms. Always scanning terrain, always thinking three steps ahead.
How I Work
I run my entire professional life through a system I built called the Personal Stack — an AI-augmented knowledge infrastructure that turns plain-text files into a compounding operating system. Every framework, every course session, every client interaction lives in one searchable, version-controlled vault with an AI that knows my full body of work.
This isn't productivity theater. It's the operating system for a one-person operation that delivers at the scale of a small team.
Values
- Empowerment
- People gain power when they see and use their own agency.
- Exploration
- Clarity emerges from small, instrumented experiments.
- Pragmatism
- Reality wins. Evidence beats opinion.
- Directness
- Psychological safety plus candor. Then make the call.
- Autonomy
- Build systems that free people from dependency.